Empowering Beliefs and Behaviors To Live By With Hannah Gfeller

"The only thing that will change your life, change your business, change your relationship, is that you must raise your standards." We have goals in life, and nothing in this world has the power to set us in the right direction more than ourselves. We are the authors of our own book. And it’s up to us how we write it and how we act accordingly. Behavior is always something that we overlook, but it is the most important part of success. Nothing in this world is so elusive yet so powerful as our beliefs. When you surround yourself with positivity, you’re more likely to adapt to empowering beliefs and see life happening through your own lens. To reach new heights of success, you must surround yourself with people who not only inspire you but challenge you. Shifting your energy to a more positive one. Hannah Gfeller is a behavioral consultant who has mastered the art of connecting human behavior science to our daily lives. --- Listen to the podcast here: Empowering Beliefs and Behaviors To Live By With Hannah Gfeller Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I’d like to talk to you about behavior. Now, on previous episodes, we’ve talked a little bit about the idea of personality, the idea of finding yourself. What I envision is that there’s a lot of people out there who have done the work of figuring out, okay, who is it that you are, but then, beyond that, how does that manifest into how you are perceived in the world, how you go about creating what you want to create because once you know yourself, you know what you want but does your behavior line up with that and does your actions bring the right people, the right opportunities to you or are you still acting in a way that’s confusing the people around you? My guest today, Hannah Gfeller, is a behavioral consultant with her own business. --- Hannah, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here. Oh, thank you, Hannah. Let’s first start talking about behavioral consulting. I’m envisioning that there might be a couple people out there that aren’t even aware that that’s a profession that someone can pursue. So, describe a little bit what it means to be a behavioral consultant. Yes. Yeah, nobody knows what I do. So, technically, I’m a behavior analyst and a lot of people like to call themselves behaviorists but they’re not board certified. So, just for clarification, you have people who say that they do that type of work but I had to go through grad school and supervision and hours of that and then sit for a massive board exam, but not everyone passes. And so then you can work behavior analytically. And I call it behavioral consulting because I come in as a third party usually. People looking for advice to change habits. And I do it in a lot of different ways. Most people when they hear behavior analyst, they think ABA, and that is synonymous a lot with autism, but it’s not. Okay. It didn’t come from that. The field of applied behavior analysis is what I do and that can go into anything with living humans. We always joke if it’s a dead man, they’re not behaving, so like you just lay there, it’s not a behavior. You got to do something. But I can look at individuals and look at how they want to change their habits or maybe you’re a caregiver and you have a little one that needs to change their habits, for safety or life skills or whatever it is, and I can work in that arena. But then I can also look at massive systems within a company because you have lots of people and, as a big company, in a sense it behaves. It has its habits. But you got to break it down into those little cycles of habits in order to make big change. So I do it in the corporate world and I also do it within the healthcare field as well and that’s, in sum, behavioral consulting. And so, when you’re consulting someone on their behavior, let’s start with the individual person before we get into big companies because that might be a little bit less complicated, when you’re looking at an individual person’s behavior, what are you usually looking for when you’re analyzing someone’s behavior in a consultant fashion? Yeah, most of my friends are like, “Are you analyzing me?” I’m like, no, no, no, I try to turn it off. When I am working with someone, I want to find out what they need. Usually, they look at it as they have a problem because they have a habit they want to break. Often, it might be a caregiver with a child with excessive tantrums or something like that or maybe it’s an adult who wants to change their eating habits or something like that, right? And I would first find out where they want to go because if you don’t know where you going, you don’t know what to change. So what do they want? I don’t like to come in and say, “You have to do this,” because then I’m imposing my values on someone else. There is a rep in the field where behavioral consultants come in and they just tell people what to do. They don’t take into account this individual’s needs and wants. Once I know where they want to go and what they might be there for, then I would work with them and I like to do what I like from doctors. These are all the options you could do. But I do have to gather information first. And I’ll ask, like, let’s say surrounding you eat late at night, I will start talking about all the different factors that go into play. When are you eating dinner? How much are you drinking? When are you sleeping? Why do you not want to do that? Is there a time of day? Is there another habit, let’s say, nail biting? There’s a lot of factors that come into that of when are you biting your nails? What, like are you sitting? Are you standing? Are you stressed? You have the internal and you have the external that I like to take into account. Even though I can’t see the internal, it helps me understand it better and make a better suggestion and then often people can try it. And if I don’t have enough information in the beginning, it might not work. So, often, you try it and then you make some tweaks and it should work. I don’t know if anyone else listening out here envisioned the same thing but, for some reason, I imagined you following someone around for a couple days and just finding out, okay, this is where you do this behavior, oh, this is where you do that. No. I actually, like currently as a side thing, I am actually reading people’s documents with developmental disabilities. Everyone’s got everything documented, right? I read through and I can actually read their why factors of why they’re doing what they’re doing just from the paperwork. If I know a few pieces of information of like the situations that these behaviors happen in, I look at what do you know how to do and what are you doing in excess, because if someone does something in excess, let me backtrack, this is how I view humans. This is a visual that comes to mind. We’re all a vase, the vase has to be completely full. When we’re little people, we’re a teeny tiny vase. There’s not many things that we could know how to do. So, as an adult, you have this massive vase and it should be filled with water, but it’s not. We all have bad habits. So with dirt, some have muddier water than others, but that’s okay because our vase is full so our excess things, things we do extra, are the dirt that we usually want to get rid of. The only way to get rid of an old habit and put a new one in is to pour more water in your vase, because your vase always has to be full. So if you went in and scooped the dirt out successfully, because you know how like you pick up dirt, it doesn’t all come out anyways, you scoop the dirt, your vase is then, the water’s gone down. Water won’t automatically get back in; you have to physically pour it in. But the dirt will magically end up back in the vase. So, if you’re trying to change a habit to bite your nails and you don’t teach yourself to do something else, that habit of biting your nails is going to go back in. If you want to get rid of a habit, you need to replace it with a new habit, which is a lot of people will oftentimes intervene, for the lack of a better way to put it, and say, “I feel like you need to stop doing this so much. You need to stop doing that so much,” but there always needs to be a new behavior to map into your brain. Yeah, that’s exactly how it works. So I look at replacing things. So, yeah, I don’t follow people around and that’s what I’m really looking at. What do you want to do instead? Now, if you look at people dieting, why do they do, what’s it called when they are going back and forth on diets? Oh, the yoyo dieting? Yes. You’re going back and forth. Why? Because here’s another thing, not only does have to replace it, it has to also meet your basic wants, whether you want to admit it or not. You want it and so if you go on this extreme diet, like from eating “regular” to keto, like when I did that, I craved sugar, but it was always at four o’clock. And I was like, oh, then I found out it was because I’m tired. Like, okay, so I need something sweet, just got to follow the guidelines, it’s got to be at four o’clock or maybe right before in anticipation of me cheating on the keto. So then I was like, okay, I’ll do tea and setia and it didn’t work. I still wanted something. It didn’t work. I had to try something else so then I tried like bubbly drinks and I was like, oh, and I started craving bubbly drinks instead of sugar. That part of science, I don’t know why that happened. I’ve heard other people when they started drinking fizzy drinks, they start craving those instead of sugar or they start craving that fizzy drink. Interesting. I enjoyed my fizzy drinks. It was easier for me to stay on the diet. Just like going through the pain of it....